Just as I was awakening today the title of the recent Academy Award’s Best Picture winner “The Hurt Locker” came into my mind. Such a powerful movie. I didn’t catch how it got its name, but the words in the title started turning around in my head –  hurt locker, the lockers where we store our hurts, hurts locked in. When we don’t know how to process our hurts we lock them away; when they are too big for us we lock them away. Hurts get stored. I picture it as a vibrational frequency stored in the cells and the genes, continuing even when we don’t remember the scenes in which the hurt happened. Their frequencies constantly influence perception, thought, emotion, behavior. Evidence and observation demonstrate that they are passed on from generation to generation also.

So today I have mused about how to unlock the locker and do some spring cleaning. Wendell Berry has a poem about opening a trench in the ground each spring where he deposits “useless words, fragments, errors.”  After listing all the things he places there he says:

To the sky, to the wind, then
to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders:
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
Of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

Maybe some such ritual would be healpful. Wow, I just mistyped helpful, and look at it! I like it. Healpful. Wendell Berry talked about burying useless words and look what already came up – a new one.

However we do it, I hope we will open up our hurt lockers and discard contents that have passed their expiration date. I wish for everyone such a clearing and healing. Time for new, fresh perception, emotion and life.